Can't Be Convicted, She's Earned Her Degree
by tito72
Summary: Toni might be extremely irritable lately and the kid might not have grown out of his Terrible Twos yet, but at least Steve's got things under control. Sequel to She Can Lead You To Love (Take You or Leave You), which means genderswap and post-wwii au


Notes:

Just a tiny little timestamp to She Can Lead You to Love. A 'day in the life' piece, if you will. There may be more after this, but I don't have any solid plans yet.

Honestly, this will probably cause more questions than it will answer. Go ahead and ask if you want, but there are some secrets that Toni will never tell and will therefore remain firmly in the past, no matter what happens from here on out.

Warning for a tiny bit of racism, because Howard's a dick, and sexism, because sometimes total strangers are dicks. Also a warning for drinking while pregnant, but before you go giving Toni hell about it, remember that it was the forties and while there was research on the topic, the social stigma of drinking while pregnant wasn't as fully developed as it is today. And even today, there are doubts about the validity of that particular bit of science.

Incidentally, there are major spoilers here for the first fic in this series, so you should defs read that one first. Also, I mean, it probably won't make much sense if you don't.

Howard's already in the study when Toni gets there, drinking his bootlegged gin and staring out the window. He turns when he hears her, but when he sees who it is, he just sighs and shakes his head sadly before turning away again. Toni steps up beside him and can see the streets of war-torn Paris below them.

"It's bad, isn't it?" she says conversationally. She thinks she might see a puddle of her own blood down there, staining the broken brick of the sidewalk.

"It's a disaster," her father says. He takes a sip of his gin, thoughtfully. "Though not as bad as you."

"What did I ever do?" Toni asks indignantly. She sets down her teddy bear and squares her shoulders as best as her nightie will allow. It's the blue one, she notes idly, the one made to look like a little sailor outfit. She outgrew it when she was ten.

"You killed me, for one," her father says.

Toni nods. It's true, she had. She'd turned his hair gray by the time she was twelve with her antics and there's no doubt that she caused the heart attack that killed him, either. "What else?" she asks, because she's a glutton for punishment and because she wants him to read her a story before bed.

Howard puts down his glass and starts to tick things off on his fingers. "You had a child out of wedlock," he says and of course that's the first thing he mentions. "You whored around during the war. You let a woman take over my company. You let your child be kidnapped."

"So did you," Toni interrupts. "Twice, in fact, which is worse than my record.

"We're not talking about me, Antonia," her father snaps. "We're talking about you. You disgraced yourself in the public eye. You took up with a Russian black widow and a crooked army colonel. You tried to shoot yourself before the war even started. You let a Negro bend you over a desk in a French hotel when you were fourteen. You couldn't even keep his half-breed baby alive long enough to bring it into this world, could you? And I'll tell you this, you won't be able to save this one, either."

"That's a lie," Toni says, but her hands are covered in blood again and her chest is aching the way it had after the bullet had gone through her. That was a different baby, a different time, but it doesn't matter. "You don't know that. You don't know anything. You're just a drunk old man who knocked his wife around and took away my teddy bear and looked down on everyone-"

Steve nudges Toni awake.

"You okay?" he asks cautiously. "You were talking in your sleep again. Just kept muttering, 'Freud, Freud,' over and over again."

"How appropriate," Toni says, drying her eyes. "Excuse me while I go destroy my father's study." She moves to get up, but Steve catches her arm and hauls her back into bed beside him.

"Whoa, there, tiger. Let's talk this out, huh? What were you dreaming about?"

"My father," Toni says tersely. She and Steve don't talk about her father much. Steve doesn't know much about the man, though he went to his silly little expo before the war started. Toni's got enough mixed feelings about Howard for the both of them, though, so Steve wisely keeps silent on the matter.

"Oh," Steve says. He pauses, considers, then hesitantly asks, "Wanna tell me about it?"

"Not especially," Toni says grumpily.

She's been on-edge for weeks and while she'll admit part of it is probably hysterics from the new baby, the other part is that she just hasn't been sleeping well. It's not all nightmares, either; Grant has been suffering from a fear of the dark for a while now and will periodically wake up crying. Steve and Toni have made a pact not to go to him every time they hear him cry, lest they spoil him, but they've made it clear he's perfectly welcome in their bed any time he wants, so three nights out of seven, he crawls in with them around two in the morning. For Steve, it's not a problem, since he can just roll over and go back to sleep afterward, but for Toni, who's never slept well, it's more complicated than that. She doesn't blame the kid, but she does hope he'll get over this soon.

"That's fine," Steve tells her. "Wanna cuddle?"

"No," Toni says, but she doesn't fight it when he pulls her into his arms and rests his cheek against the top of her head. She sighs and buries her face in his neck, takes a deep breath and tries not to think about her father.

Toni's alone when she wakes up in the morning. The sun is shining through the window and she can hear Grant snuffling in his sleep over the baby radio, the one she made herself because the single model on the market is crap. She yawns, stretches, and forces herself to her feet. She stumbles down the hall to the bathroom, where she stares at herself intently in the mirror.

She doesn't look that different, she decides, from the woman who seduced a handsome lieutenant during the war. A little older, sure, but the eyes are the same and so are the pointy nose and pursed lips. She's even grown her hair back out, though it's her natural dark brown now and not the blonde it was then. Still, she looks exactly like the kind of girl Steve would be in love with. Though, of course, he hasn't ever seen her fat and pregnant and horribly cranky yet, so there's still time for that to change.

Shaking her head in disgust, she splashes her face with water and brushes her teeth. She takes her time pinning her hair up and back; she's not going to the factory today, but Grant's been known to enjoy pulling hair and he's strong for a three year old. Then she goes back to her room and throws on a pair of trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, though she leaves the top few buttons undone and dutifully rolls the sleeves up past her forearms. She grabs a pair of suspenders, too, the ones that don't fit Steve and haven't for going on ten years now, apparently. A pair of Oxfords (women's and the only thing on her person that is) complete the look and she's ready to go.

Grant's still asleep in his little bed when Toni gets into the room, but he wakes up pretty quickly when Toni pulls the blinds. The sunlight spills in through the bars on the window, which are an ugly necessity. Toni's not taking any chances on Grant's safety, never again. That's why Grant's in the room next to them, because Steve's got fantastic hearing and Clem's second-favorite Luger (possibly the one that put a bullet through Toni in France, which Clara will neither confirm nor deny) in his bedside table drawer. If anyone's foolish enough to attempt another kidnapping, they'll be ready.

"Hello, darling," she says when Grant blinks sleepily up at her.

"Hi, Mommy," Grant says, waving his little fist at her. "Time for brefast?"

"Almost," Toni says. She picks him up and hugs him to her, thinking wistfully about how she won't be able to soon and after she can again, he may well be too big for it. She hugs him for a minute until he starts to squirm and whine, then she puts him back down on his bed and picks out his clothes. She doesn't have half the taste in clothes that Pepper does, though she certainly knows what's scandalous, but all of Grant's little clothes are adorable and very expensive, so even if she fails totally at dressing him, he still looks good. She picks him out a pair of short pants, a set of high socks, and a tiny little argyle sweater. He doesn't fight her when she tries to dress him, so it's only a matter of minutes before they're in the bathroom brushing his little tiny teeth. He makes a face at the fluoride in the toothpaste, but he doesn't fight her or spit it out like he's been known to do, which makes it a pretty remarkable morning so far.

She just knows it's too good to be true. Grant proves her right in that, because no sooner does she have him at the table with his scrambled eggs and his apple juice than he turns his cup over. "Grant!" Toni says, exasperated and makes a dive to sweep him up into her arms before the juice can spill all over his clothes. "Come on, kid! What are you doing?" Grant starts to pout, but Toni ignores him, just looks around for somewhere to set him down where he won't get into any trouble.

"I'll take him, Toni," Alexandra says from behind her and Toni hands him over with a grateful smile.

"Thank you, sweetie," Toni says. The girl has been a godsend, really. She's twelve now, old enough to be minding babies in earnest and she apparently spent her entire three years in the orphanage running after little ones. "You're a miracle, you know that?"

Alex smiles and coos at Grant, who sticks his tongue out at her in defiance. Just like his mom, that one. Meanwhile, Toni grabs a rag from the sink and wipes down the table, the chair, the floor, and all the other places the juice splashed. Then she has Alex put Grant back into his chair and pushes his plate of eggs back in front of him.

"Guess you're gonna be mighty thirsty," she says casually. "And if you even think about throwing that plate of eggs, you'll be hungry, too, possibly until supper."

Grant looks at her narrow-eyed, like he's thinking of sticking his tongue out at her, too, but he thinks better of it and goes to work on his eggs with a pout still on his face.

"You hungry?" she asks Alex, but the girl shakes her head.

"I ate this morning," she says. "Steve made me French toast and applesauce."

Toni grimaces, slightly nauseous all of the sudden, but she swallows it back. "Where is Steve?" she asks. Bruce is at the lab, that goes without saying, but Steve's usually back from his run by this time and reading his paper at the table, and today he's nowhere to be seen. "For that matter, where are your mom and Natasha?"

"Steve went to meet with the Colonel," she says, smiling at the thought of the man who personally took her away from life at the orphanage, though the idea of someone having a crush on Fury gives Toni the shivers. "Mom and Natasha went to spy on someone important across the city. Bucky went with them."

"Sounds interesting," Toni says dully. If there's one thing she learned in the war, it's that she can't be the type of spy who sits and watches people through their windows. She needs to be part of the action, in the thick of things, distracting and mesmerizing so other people can do the observation work. Though, of course, she rarely fails to see the things that are right in front of her. Like Grant eyeing up his fork like it's a weapon, for instance.

"Grant," Toni warns. "Don't you dare."

He does.

"What happened to you?" Steve asks when he gets home in the early afternoon. Toni's currently lying on the couch in the play room with a cold cloth on her forehead and a bandage across her right hand where the fork had cut her. Grant had cried for half an hour after she'd spanked him, but honestly, using forks on people was a definite no-no. He's over it now, anyway, and playing patty-cake across the room with Alex.

"Your child is a menace," Toni says weakly. "He does things specifically because he knows they'll drive me up the wall."

"Sounds like someone I know," Steve says, and that right there would be a lot more cutting if Toni hadn't already thought it herself about a hundred times a day.

"I know," she says. "Don't think I don't know. Everyone in the damn city knows. No one in their right mind would ever think that boy gets his wild streak from polite, well-mannered Captain Rogers."

"Polite and well-mannered aren't insults, Toni," Steve says. He lifts up her feet and sits down at the other end of the couch, then puts her feet in his lap and starts to rub at them. Toni grimaces and Steve glances down at his hands. "Are your ankles swollen?" he asks, bemused.

"Are you calling me fat?" Toni counters, because she's not ready to tell him about the baby when she's a mess like this.

"I didn't say that," Steve backtracks quickly. "Never mind."

Toni decides to take pity on him and change the subject. "What did Fury say?"

"New lead on Loki," Steve says. "Fury thinks the guy might have finally crawled out of whatever hole he's been hiding in for the past few years. There are some shady weapons trades going on across the Atlantic and Fury thinks it might be him. There's a bartender down by the docks that Fury says might have more information, if we 'persuade' him to cooperate."

"Sounds like fun," Toni says. She's not going to do anything dangerous for a while, she's really not, but there's no reason she can't go watch. She does enjoy Steve being all muscly and intense. "Need some help?"

"I do need someone to sit in the bar and keep watch," Steve says. "I was going to ask Bucky, since you're not that great at sitting still, but I guess you can just order a drink or something and keep yourself occupied."

"You've got yourself a partner," Toni says. She swings her legs off Steve's lap and sits up. She'll have to dig out a skirt and a blouse if she's going to blend in, but she's sure she's got that stuff somewhere around her closet, kept for occasions just like this one. "Watch Grant for a bit, okay? Then once Nat and Clem come back from wherever the hell they are, we can go."

The bar is a dive, but Toni's been in worse, both during the war and before it in her troubled teenage years. She finds a seat at a table near the back, conveniently close to the door to the backroom, where Steve drags the owner of the place. He sends her a wink as he passes and she smiles back at him. She thinks about getting herself a drink, but she's barely got her ass in the seat before she's got company.

"Hello, doll," a man says, sitting down across from Toni and putting a drink in front of her. He's got a beer in his other hand, but the drink he's just set down is a fancy orange-ish cocktail, Toni doesn't know what kind.

"Hiya," Toni says disinterestedly, eyeing the drink skeptically. "What's this?"

"Just a drink for a pretty gal," the man says, smiling like he thinks he's got an in.

"I like scotch on the rocks," Toni tells him. She's not much for fruit, to be honest, and she's pretty sure these silly little drinks have lime juice and things in them. Clem seems to like them, but Clem's just a child. Now, Natasha, she only drinks straight vodka and only at certain times of the year, so she's no help either way. Neither is Pepper, for that matter, because she's a goddamn teetotaler.

The man's brows furrow. "That might be too much drink for you, kitten," he says kindly.

Toni snorts. "You think so?" she asks him. He's probably about her age and fairly good-looking, but clearly doesn't know the difference between a kitten and a hungry tigress. Toni's not going to eat him up, she swears, she's a good, married girl now, but that doesn't mean she can't play with him a bit before letting him loose. "What would you suggest?"

"This here's a Mary Pickford," he says, nudging the drink forward again. "Right type of drink for a pretty dame like you."

Toni looks at the man, looks at the drink, then reaches for the thing with her right hand, keeping her left below the table still. She hasn't been drinking so much since she stopped getting her period about two months ago, just one or two drinks here or there, once a week or so, no big deal. It's not good for the baby to drink a lot, she's been told, but her own mother drank the entire way through her pregnancy and Toni turned out perfectly fine, thank you. She'll probably stop once the baby becomes an actual baby and not just a little slippery thing inside her, and also after she manages to, you know, tell Steve about it. But for now, one drink while she's waiting for her guy isn't going to hurt.

The drink is tolerable, barely. She doesn't make a face afterward, but only because she's been way too well-trained by Nick Fury for that. She drank a lot worse during the war, for sure. Semen, for one thing, and from old, sweaty German officers sometimes. Steve was the nicest lay she's ever had, she'll tell you that for nothing.

"Not bad," she says, putting the drink back on the table and smiling sweetly at the man, no hint at all of the fangs she's going to use to tear him apart.

"Glad you think so," the man says. "I'm Frank, by the way."

"Annie," Toni says, taking up the stirrer in the drink and beginning to play with it, flirtatious-like, the way Natasha showed her way back when. "So what do you do, Frank?"

"I'm a machinist," he says. "But I don't expect you to know anything about that. I suppose you're a secretary or a dress-shop girl?"

"A welder, actually," Toni says tightly. "Among other things."

"A welder?" Frank asks, surprised. "The war's over, doll. No need for you to keep on with a man's sort of work." He says it like he thinks he's being kind, like he's doing her a favor, letting her off the hook or something.

"Maybe I enjoy it," Toni says. "I do love to work with my hands."

"But you can do that at home," Frank presses. "Cleaning floors and baking pies. Don't that sound more fun than factory work?"

"Clearly you've never cleaned a floor or baked a pie," Toni says, smiling to herself. This man doesn't know who he's fooling with.

"Well, no," the man says, flustered. "But that's different. That's woman's work. They like it, like being at home and doing that sort of thing."

It's true, Toni knows it's true. Some women really enjoy keeping house and baking and things. Toni's just not one of them. This man doesn't know that, though. He seems to legitimately believe he's saving her from a life of misery by showing her the light and taking her back to the kitchen. He'd probably give her an allowance, she thinks, and tell her to go buy whatever her little heart desires, but only as long as he approves of it. Like a child, she thinks in disgust.

Carefully, she looks down at her hands in her lap, blinks a few times to get her eyes misting up, and looks up at him. "You're right," she says tearfully. "Of course, you're right. I was so blind, but now I can see again. I'm going to go home right now and bake a pie. And after that, I'll get down on my knees and scrub my kitchen floor until it shines. And then, maybe I'll do some laundry. After that, I suppose the only thing left to do will be to get fucked."

Frank has been nodding along approvingly until this last bit, when he stops and stares at her, taken aback. "Wait, what?" he asks, clearly coming to the conclusion that he misheard her.

"I'm going to let a man put his dick inside me and fuck me with it," she says without emotion. "After all, that's what a woman's good for, right? Keeping the house clean and spreading her legs whenever you want her, that's the type of gal you're looking for."

"Look," Frank says slowly, eyeing her oddly. "I don't know what type of lady you are-"

"Well that's your problem," Toni tells him, quite cheerful now. "You've been under the impression I'm a lady. I'll tell you right now, that just isn't true. Female, yes; lady, absolutely not. I'm not surprised you didn't notice the difference, though. I mean, all girls are the same to you, right? Just a nice pair of legs and what's between them ain't bad, either."

In the background, that damn Woody Woodpecker song comes on the radio and Toni's eye twitches involuntarily. The man doesn't seem to notice, though, all wrapped up in staring at her like she's a looney, which isn't that far from the truth, sometimes. His face is turning a bit red from embarrassment or frustration, looks Toni knows intimately and sees often. Finally, he sputters out, "Who are you?"

"Antonia Rogers," Toni says, pleased with the way the name rolls off her tongue. "Formerly Stark." She holds up her left hand at last and wiggles her finger and the ring on it.

"Married?" Frank repeats, dumbstruck. "But you're out here at the bar, drinking and flirting. And you said you do welding at a factory! Who takes care of your family, huh? Who makes sure they've got dinner on the table and clean clothes in the drawer? What kind of husband lets you just ignore all that stuff and go off playing at being a real worker?"

"The kind of husband who doesn't need waited on hand and foot," Steve says easily from behind the man. "The kind of husband who respects his wife, and in fact, all women, to make their own decisions." He pauses, smiling ruefully. "Though to be fair, I wasn't always like that."

The man wheels around, face twisted up in a scowl that dies on his lips when he sees the muscles Steve's got on him. "This broad belong to you?" he asks, nodding his head toward Toni.

Steve considers this. "Well," he says carefully, "she's my wife. But I wouldn't say she belongs to me, necessarily."

"Except my heart," Toni butts in, rather embarrassed with herself even as she says it. "That totally belongs to you. So that's about, what, .5 percent of my body weight?"

"There you have it," Steve tells the man, not able to keep a straight face. "About half a percent of her belongs to me. The rest is all hers."

"Except for the baby," Toni adds. "And that probably weighs less than an ounce still. But it'll get bigger."

Steve's jaw drops and he looks at her, hope and awe in his eyes as he swallows, then says, "Baby?"

"For about two months," Toni confirms, smiling, too, even though she probably looks like a sap. Also, some crappy bar by the docks probably isn't the right place to tell Steve this sort of thing, but heck, it sure beats telling him twenty months too late and in a terrible panic over a kidnapping like what happened last time.

"My God," Steve says, moving around the table to hug her, the other man completely forgotten, left to storm off in a huff at not getting the girl. "That's wonderful! I love you so much!"

"I love you, too," Toni whispers, quiet so no one else in the joint will hear. She's got a reputation to protect, after all.

By the time they get home, they're just in time for supper, during which they make the announcement about the new baby to their friends, all of whom say nice things and congratulate them. Well, Bruce, Pepper and Happy all say nice things, anyway; Bucky and Natasha exchange a glance that's rather suspicious and Clem says something rather insulting about Toni's propensity for spreading her legs. She doesn't say it so explicitly, of course, not with Alexandra in the seat beside her and Grant in Toni's lap. Still, if the new baby's first word is 'slut,' there'll be hell to pay.

After dinner, they have to wait around until Grant's bedtime, when Toni and Steve both go in to tuck him in. Steve says some prayers with him while Toni nods along philosophically, then Toni kisses his forehead. "If you get scared tonight," she says softly, "we're right next door." She tells him that every night, but she doesn't want him to have a childhood like hers, too scared of the moving things in the dark to sleep in her own room and too scared of her father to go knock on her parent's door.

"I'm sorry about brefast, Mommy," Grant says sleepily, and Toni sighs, smiles at her son.

"That's okay, baby," she says. "But tomorrow, Daddy's feeding you."

"Goodnight, buddy," Steve says.

They leave the door open a crack and the hall light on for him. Then they go into their room and celebrate the new baby with a rather lovely sexual encounter. It's only afterward, lying in each other's arms that Steve finally asks about the man.

"What did that fella at the bar want, anyway?" he asks.

"To lecture me on women's places in society," Toni says. "But I think I might have driven him to it, to be honest."

"I'm somehow not surprised," Steve says fondly. "You do seem to enjoy making people crazy."

"Good thing you're already crazy, then," Toni says.

"Good thing," Steve agrees.

There's a moment of silence, then Toni blurts out, "Never let me become my father, okay?"  
Steve doesn't even blink, just says, "Okay," and kisses her forehead, the same way she had to Grant, the same way they both will to this new baby.

And he won't, she knows. No matter what kind of crazy shit happens in the future, Steve doesn't break promises. He'll keep her sane and more importantly, he'll keep her kids happy. Toni's mother wasn't strong enough to keep her husband in line and she died when Toni was too young to take any kind of lesson from her. Steve, though, he's here and he's going to protect these kids from whatever danger lies in the Stark blood. He promised and he'll do it and the kids will be safe. And that, above everything else, is why Toni loves him.

"Good night," she whispers.

"Good night, Antonia," Steve says. "Good night, little baby."

"Grace," Toni corrects him sleepily. "Grace Anne."

"Grant Anthony and Grace Anne," she hears Steve say thoughtfully as she drifts off. "Sounds just like a family, to me."


End file.
